This includes details based on content-type, like stats from Web, Videos, Images and News featured more prominently.

“This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, we also show how many items have been indexed,” explains Webmaster Tools engineer Kamila Primke. “With these enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps Labs feature, which will be retired.”

There is also now the ability to test a sitemap. “Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors,” says Primke. “Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.”

Google also has a new way of displaying errors, which the company says better exposes what types of issues a sitemap contains. Rather than repeating the same kind of error numerous times for one sitemap, Google will group errors and warnings, giving a few examples.

For sitemap index files, Google aggregates errors and warnings from the child sitemaps that the sitemap index encloses, so users won’t have to click through each child one at a time.

The functionality of the delete button has changed as well. It will now remove the sitemap from Webmaster Tools from both your account and the accounts of the other owners of a site.

From his Google+ post:

When: Thursday 26 January 2012 at 3:30pm UK time. Find out the time where you are at: http://goo.gl/Xwh7J

Where: A hangout here on Google+. It works best with a webcam + headset. You can find out more about Hangouts and how to participate at http://goo.gl/ZH9xZ

Topic? Anything webmaster related like crawling, mobile, indexing, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Webmaster Tools, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc.

Please join us! Hope to see many of you soon! Don’t forget to bring your questions or post them here ahead of time if you can’t make it

Google hosts these office hours hangouts around 1-3 times a week. Yesterday, Google’s John Mueller hosted one on similar topics.

They do this 1-3 times a week, but there’s a lot of learning opportunity. Mueller says:

When: Wednesday, 25 January 2012 at 10am CET/9am GMT / http://goo.gl/I0E25 / http://goo.gl/u5Dr9

Where: A hangout here on Google+. It works best with a webcam + headset. You can find out more about Hangouts and how to participate at http://goo.gl/ZH9xZ

Topic? Anything webmaster related like crawling, indexing, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Webmaster Tools, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc.

Google asks that participants bring questions or post them here on this Google+ update in the comments.

I’m guessing the page layout algorithm change will be a a topic that comes up.

That doesn’t just go for helping your search rankings (which it can), but it provides a direct line of communication with many, many Googlers. It’s a great place to get advice from Google, and to share feedback. And it’s not just empty feedback. They’re actively participating in meaningful conversations with users, and have shown that they are taking ideas into consideration (for example, see recent Gmail integration).

This week, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller posted the following in a Google+ update:

“Google has tried a lot of new things this year when it comes to webmaster support — such as the hangouts in a variety of languages. Which parts do you all think we should work on next year? How can we make it easier for you all to make awesome websites, which are easily findable in web-search?”

“More hangouts? videos? more documentation? more detailed examples?”

This seems like a good opportunity to not only to raise this question ourselves with our readers, but to spread the question further, because you can actually participate in this conversation and possibly have an impact on future Google offerings, which can in turn benefit your site in the long run, and after a crazy year of algorithm changes, I’m sure many of you are looking for any leg up possible.

Google has already been hosting a slew of webmaster hangouts on Google+, and if you haven’t been taking advantage of this, why not? You are getting free access to some advice right from the horse’s mouth.

If you read WebProNews regularly, you should also know that Google puts out a lot of webmaster videos, generally starring Matt Cutts. We cover them fairly frequently, because they’re generally full of helpful knowledge for webmasters. Even when they contain things you already knew, sometimes it helps to be reminded of certain things, or Cutts might present the topic in a slightly different light than you looked at it before. It’s a good idea to watch these videos.

Here are some of the responses Mueller has received to his question so far:

Thomas Morffew: More people like you John, that are real faces, and available to help.

Bret Sutherland: When will Google shopping/product search get staff who are open and responsive?

Do you agree with any of these commenters? Have other ideas?

“When you notice a drastic drop in your rankings and traffic from Google, what process would you take for diagnosing the issue?”

“One thing I would do very early on, is I would do ‘site:mydomain.com’ and figure out are you completely not showing up in Google or do parts of your site show up in Google?” he begins. “That’s also a really good way to find out whether you are partially indexed. Or if you don’t see a snippet, then maybe you had a robots.txt that blocked us from crawling. So we might see a reference to that page, and we might return something that we were able to see when we saw a link to that page, but we weren’t able to see the page itself or weren’t able to fetch it.”

“You might also notice in the search results if we think that you’re hacked or have malware, then we might have a warning there,” he adds. “And that could, of course, lead to a drop in traffic if people see that and decide not to go to the hacked site or the site that has malware.”

Then it’s on to Webmaster Tools.

“The next place I’d look is the webmaster console,” says Cutts. “Google.com/webmasters prove that you control or own the site in a variety of ways. And we’re doing even more messages than we used to do. Not just things like hidden text, park domains, doorway pages. Actively quite a few different types of messages that we’re publishing now, and when we think there’s been a violation of our quality guidelines. If you don’t see any particular issue or message listed there, then you might consider going to the Webmaster Forum.”

“As part of that, you might end up asking yourself, is this affecting just my site or a lot of other people? If it’s just your site, then it might be that we thought that your site violated our guidelines, or of course, it could be a server-related issue or an issue on your site, of course, on your side,” he says. “But it could also be an algorithmic change. And so if a bunch of people are all seeing a particular change, then it might be more likely to be something due to an algorithm.”

We’ve certainly seen plenty of that lately, and will likely see more tweaks to Panda for the time being, based on this recent tweet from Cutts:

“You can also check other search engines, because if other search engines aren’t listing you, that’s a pretty good way to say, well, maybe the problem is on my side. So maybe I’ve deployed some test server, and maybe it had a robots.txt or a noindex so that people wouldn’t see the test server, and then you pushed it live and forgot to remove the noindex,” Cutts continues in the video. “You can also do Fetch as Googlebot. That’s another method. That’s also in our Google Webmaster console. And what that lets you do is send out Googlebot and actually retrieve a page and show you what it fetched. And sometimes you’ll be surprised. It could be hacked or things along those lines, or people could have added a noindex tag, or a rel=canonical that pointed to a hacker’s page.”

“We’ve also seen a few people who, for whatever reason, were cloaking, and did it wrong, and shot themselves in the foot,” he notes. “And so they were trying to cloak, and instead they returned normal content to users and completely empty content to Googlebot.”

“Certainly if you’ve changed your site, your hosting, if you’ve revamped your design, a lot of that can also cause things,” he says. “So you want to look at if there’s any major thing you’ve changed on your side, whether it be a DNS, host name, anything along those lines around the same time. That can definitely account for things. If you deployed something that’s really sophisticated AJAX, maybe the search engines are[n't] quite able to crawl that and figure things out.

Cutts, of course advises filling out a reconsideration request, once you think you’ve figured the issue.

If you’re a Webmaster Tools user, you can thank Google for a new “Site Health” feature. In a nutshell, it’s Google’s way of helping you prioritize what you’re doing in WMT by highlighting the “health problems” your site has. In fact, they’ve even redesigned the homepage around this concept.

Do you like the new design? Share your opinion in the comments.

The thinking is that you can see what needs attention the most, in order, according to Google. Given how much sites generally rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, whose advice would you rather take in this department?

If you don’t want to see sites listed by priority, you have the ability to view them alphabetically like before.

The new home page is only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your account, but they don’t all have to be verified. Google says it will be available for all accounts in the future. If you have over 100, you can still access Site Health info from the top of the dashboard for each site.

So what’s included in this site health data? Malware detection, important pages that have been removed with Google’s URL removal tool, and important pages that are blocked from crawling in robots.txt.

Google will provide additional info about any of these things as they’re found.

In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa writes, “A word about ‘important pages: ‘as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on ‘important pages.’ Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.”

“Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website ‘unhealthy;’ in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site,” she adds. “But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.”

It’s important to note that it may take several days for Google’s health warnings to go away after you fix the problems. Hopefully they can do something to speed that up in the future as well. If you’re still seeing it after a week, Moskwa says, the problem may not be resolved.

Feedback from webmasters about site health has been generally positive, but some still want more. For example, on Moskwa’s post, Antonio Ooi comments, “We’re more interested to know what is missing, critical level (high, moderate, low) and recommended action/solution. For example, which image alt, meta tags, video sitemap etc are missing/invalid and how to fix. Or what else that has yet to be implemented on our site to take advantage of the new Google search engine’s cool features and so on. This will not only make us work smarter, this will also make Google team work smarter.”

Another commenter going by “knowj” says, “It would be a great feature if the Webmasters Tools API allowed developers to feed error reports/logs into for websites/applications.This could generate an RSS feed/alerts ordered by priority/severity. This would create a useful single location for keeping track of the health of websites.”

What do you think? What else should Google show you as part of its site health feature? Let us know in the comments.

Now on the Analytics side of things…

In addition to launching a premium version of Google Analytics for bigger sites, Google announced the launch of Real-Time Analytics. What this means is that you can now see how your traffic is coming in as it happens, which could be huge for helping you shape your promotion strategies, and play to your strengths.

Essentially, it can help you do what you’re already doing with the data you get from Google Analytics and do it faster.

“One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet,” says John Jersin of Google’s Analytics team. “With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.”

“For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post,” he adds. “By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

He says he also uses real-time analytics to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a new campaign.

The new real-time reports are only available in the new version of Google Analytics. You can find a link to the new version at the top of Google Analytics if you’re not already using it. So far, only a few users have access to the reports, but they will be available for all in the coming weeks.

Do you think real-time analytics data will help you improve the your site’s traffic? Tell us what you think.

“As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst Susan Moskwa. “Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.”

For one, subdomains are now counted as internal links, which makes a great deal of sense. Here’s a chart showing how links have changed:

“If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links,” says Moskwa. “We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.”

She does note that if you own a root domain, your number of external links may appear to go down.

“We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms,” the company says on a “Report Scraper Pages” form, found here.

Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, tweeted about the new initiative:

This testing comes after months of iterations of Google’s Panda Update, designed to improve the quality of search results, though there has been no shortage of complaints about scrapers ranking over original content in that time.

The testing also follows a recent, big refresh of Google’s spam submission process, discussed here.

This past week, Google shared an interesting video, providing an inside look at the search algorithm tweaking process. While no earth shattering information was necessarily contained, it did provide a rare visual glimpse into the process. Watch it below.

Google’s Matt Cutts spoke about a few options for these files in the latest Webmaster Help video, in response to a user-submitted question: “Is it better to have a blank robots.txt file, a robots.txt that contains User-agent: *Disallow:” or no robots.txt file at all?”

“I would say any of the first two,” Cutts responded. “Not having a robots.txt file is a little bit risky – not very risky at all, but a little bit risky because sometimes when you don’t have a file, your web host will fill in the 404 page, and that could have various weird behaviors. Luckily we are able to detect that really, really well, so even that is only like a 1% kind of risk.”

“But if possible, I would have a robots.txt file whether it’s blank or you say User-agent: *Disallow nothing, which means everybody’s able to crawl anything they want is pretty equal,” said Cutts. “We’ll treat those syntactically as being exactly the same. For me, I’m a little more comfortable with User-agent: * and then Disallow: just so you’re being very specific that ‘yes, you’re allowed to crawl everything’. If it’s blank then yes, people were smart enough to make the robots.txt file, but it would be great to have just like that indicator that says exactly, ‘ok, here’s what the behavior is that’s spelled out.’ Otherwise, it could be like maybe somebody deleted everything in the file by accident.”

“If you don’t have one at all, there’s just that little tiny bit of risk that your web host might do something strange or unusual like return a ‘you don’t have permission to read this’ file, which you know, things get a little strange at that point.,” Cutts reiterated.

All of this, of course, assumes that you want Google to crawl your site.

In another video from Cutts we looked at yesterday, he noted that Google will sometimes use DMOZ to fill in snippets in search results when they can’t otherwise see the page’s content because it was blocked by robots.txt. He noted that Google is currently looking at whether or not it wants to continue doing this.

Google has long been preaching the gospel of quality content, and they are committed to keeping their index as spam-free as possible. Does such knowledge make potential Panda casualties easier to understand? Let us know what you think.

Think of it as collateral damage, those of you who feel you were undeservedly punished. As indicated, Panda is just another in a long line of updates designed to clean the trash out of Google’s search index, and thanks to an awesome infographic from SEO.com, Panda update victims can track the history of the war, one that started in earnest in 2003, which is around the same time Google’s hold over the search engine industry was entering the “iron-clad” stage.

Perhaps the perspective will give them some solace, as well the willingness to be prepared against future Google purges. The infographic in question. It’s a large file–almost 3000 pixels tall even with the size reduction–so be sure to click it for the full version:

Click to enlarge

Google’s search index, left unattended, would be a wasteland of spam sites, content farms, and prescription drug outlets.

Furthermore, if your site was one of the unintended victims, reports are, if the necessary corrections/alterations are made, Google will open the doors of its index and allow your site back in.

Some interesting tidbits from the infographic, at least from this perspective:

Does the extended wait between Big Daddy and Caffeine mean Google was actually satisfied with the quality of their index, save for the minor algorithm tweaks? Whatever the case, this graphic does a great job of informing webmasters about Google’s index-purging ways. It should also be a warning against complacency when it comes to website quality control.

Was a website you’re responsible for get caught in the Google Panda crossfire? If so, did it change how you approach the concept of on-site content? Do you understand Google’s motivations for spam purges like Panda? Let us know what you think in the comments.